The Mailer Review/Volume 7, 2013/Put Everything In: Difference between revisions

{{Quote box|title=''Norman Mailer: A Double Life''|By [[J. Michael Lennon]]<br />New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013<br />Release date: October 15, 2013<br />960 pp. Cloth $40.00.|align=right|width=25%}}

Many people believe they know much of Norman Mailer’s life and work. Virtually no one knows it all. This long-awaited volume does much to close that gap. J. Michael Lennon, Mailer’s archivist and confidante of many years, armed with his access to all Mailer’s letters, interviews with virtually all the intimates and principals in his life, and all the weighty Mailer papers which Lennon himself was instrumental in collecting and categorizing, does an exemplary job of presenting Mailer, the man and the writer. This is no puff piece or hagiography: Mailer told Lennon toward the end of his life, to “put everything in,” and he has: triumphs, disasters and all the warts.

Another interesting revelation is that although Mailer was proud that he had never undergone psychoanalysis, he did reveal many deeply private feelings to his close friend, psychoanalyst Robert Lindner, including “a buried fear that under everything I’m a homosexual. That was always a fear.” This concern, based on occasional episodes of impotence, was repudiated by Lindner, who said “[Y]ou’re not. What you’re suffering is latent homosexual anxiety, which is common to all of us.”

On a more important level, the subtitle first appears in a letter from the young adult Norman Mailer to his father, Barney, and refers to the latter’s “double life” as father and husband versus compulsive gambler and dapper ladies’ man. It is later applied several times to Norman himself as in this early passage: “Unfaithful in all of his marriages, Mailer was a serial philanderer. His affairs caused him and his family much misery over the next fifty years,” and in this later one: “[Mailer’s] infidelities are, in fact, the vices to which he refers. . . . They are also the reason he believed he was exactly like his father: he was also a secret addict, not to gambling, but to women. . . . Barney’s double life gave Mailer a model and even sanction for his own.”

Another excess for Mailer was, of course, his drinking. At a time when he felt that many of his New York friends were dropping him for being too radical, Lennon points out that “Mailer was obstreperous when he drank, and he was drinking a lot. . . . The booze sanctioned crazy behavior. He took on accents — an Irish brogue, a British one . . . and the Texas drawl he had learned in the army, his favorite. Asked by Dwight Macdonald why he assumed these roles, he responded that “he lived ‘in a perpetual stagefright, going to so many parties,’ and therefore ‘assumed the accents as a kind of mask.’” In the 1950s, for other reasons (notably the insights it gave him), he added marijuana, “the beginning of a long love affair with the drug.” His use of Seconal and Benzedrine were of short duration during the stressful period in the mid-fifties when he had so much trouble with the publication of ''[[The Deer Park]]'' (1955) because of what was then considered its borderline obscenity, a judgment laughable by today’s standards. (Similarly, the ''Esquire'' serial version of An American Dream was almost canceled by Arnold Gingrich because of the graphic passage of anal intercourse between Rojack and Ruta.) In any case, Mailer’s disapproval of recreational drugs other than alcohol and marijuana was strong and final after the fifties, as most clearly illuminated in ''The Armies of the Night'' when he condemns LSD as a satanic drug because of its deleterious effects on the chromosomes. He goes on to sympathize with the younger protesters at the Pentagon, those “jargon-mired, drug-vitiated children.”

''Armies'', of course, announced the beginning of the ten-year period during which Mailer would become “the preeminent insider/outsider of American culture.” The decade would also be marked by his sometimes parodied but almost universally acclaimed use of the third person to describe himself as narrator/participant in the events discussed. The other salient characteristic of this period was the prevalence of biographies of prominent Americans: Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, Henry Miller. This remarkably seminal period concluded in 1979, when Mailer published ''[[The Executioner’s Song]]'', often considered his finest book. It was biographical, yes, but Mailer was decidedly ''not'' a presence in the book, which was masterfully written largely in third person limited to convey the thoughts and style of its many characters.